“I think, Katie,” said her mother, one morning when she had been for some time watching her listless attitude, “that you find it as possible to be dull at Kingsworth as at Applehurst.”
“I suppose,” said Kate, “that one may be dull anywhere? Aren’t you ever dull, mamma?”
“No,” said Mrs Kingsworth, “I don’t think I am ever quite what you call dull. Of course I don’t mean to say that I find life always enjoyable.”
“You care more for reading and that sort of thing than I do,” said Kate.
“Yes, Katie, but even a love of intellectual pursuits is not enough by itself. There is only one thing that can keep up one’s interest in life,—that it should be filled by an earnest purpose.”
“You mean trying to be good,” said Kate, with less impatience than her mother’s formal sentences awoke within her in general.
Mrs Kingsworth felt a little rebuked, she hardly knew why.
“Every one is called to some duty,” she said, “I meant the strict fulfilment of that. It is a call to arms.”
There was a slight ring in the mother’s voice that might have seemed more proper to the girl, but then, much as such a view would have astonished Kate, the old Canon was wont to say that “Mary had kept herself shut up till she was just as romantic as a girl of eighteen.” Perhaps her high-mindedness with all its defects had kept her heart young. She went on, her eyes kindling.
“Each soldier has his post, it is dishonour to desert it; we have a post in life, a special duty, if we shrink from it we are deserters, cowards, while the sense that we are at our guard is quite enough to atone for any amount of dulness as you call it, or, I should say, for any sacrifice.”